by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
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He is a tall stoop-shouldered man with prematurely greyed hair and works as a copy writer in an advertising agency in Chicago—an agency where I also have sometimes been employed—and on that night in August I met him, walking with quick eager strides along the shore of the lake and past the tired petulant people. He did not see me at first and I wondered at the evidence of life in him when everyone else seemed half dead; but a street lamp hanging over a nearby roadway threw its light down upon my face and he pounced. “Here you, come up to my place,” he cried sharply. “I’ve got something to show you. I was on my way down to see you. That’s where I was going,” he lied as he hurried me along.
We went to his apartment on a street leading back from the lake and the park. German, Polish, Italian and Jewish families, equipped with soiled blankets and the ever-present half-filled bottles of milk, had come prepared to spend the night out of doors; but the American families in the crowd were giving up the struggle to find a cool spot and a little stream of them trickled along the sidewalks, going back to hot beds in the hot houses.
It was past one o’clock and my friend’s apartment was disorderly as well as hot. He explained that his wife, with their two children, had gone home to visit her mother on a farm near Springfield, Illinois.
We took off our coats and sat down. My friend’s thin cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone. “You know—well—you see,” he began and then hesitated and laughed like an embarrassed schoolboy. “Well now,” he began again, “I’ve long been wanting to write something real, something besides advertisements. I suppose I’m silly but that’s the way I am. It’s been my dream to write something stirring and big. I suppose it’s the dream of a lot of advertising writers, eh? Now look here—don’t you go laughing. I think I’ve done it.”
He explained that he had written something concerning Chicago, the capital and heart, as he said, of the whole Central West. He grew angry. “People come here from the East or from farms, or from little holes of towns like I came from and they think it smart to run Chicago into the ground,” he declared. “I thought I’d show ’em up,” he added, jumping up and walking nervously about the room.
He handed me many sheets of paper covered with hastily scrawled words, but I protested and asked him to read it aloud. He did, standing with his face turned away from me. There was a quiver in his voice. The thing he had written concerned some mythical town I had never seen. He called it Chicago, but in the same breath spoke of great streets flaming with color, ghostlike buildings flung up into night skies and a river, running down a path of gold into the boundless West. It was the city, I told myself, I and the people of my story had been trying to find earlier on that same evening, when because of the heat I went a little off my head and could not work any more. The people of the city, he had written about, were a cool-headed, brave people, marching forward to some spiritual triumph, the promise of which was inherent in the physical aspects of the town.
Now I am one who, by the careful cultivation of certain traits in my character, have succeeded in building up the more brutal side of my nature, but I cannot knock women and children down in order to get aboard Chicago street-cars, nor can I tell an author to his face that I think his work is rotten.
“You’re all right, Ed. You’re great. You’ve knocked out a regular soc-dolager of a masterpiece here. Why you sound as good as Henry Mencken writing about Chicago as the literary centre of America, and you’ve lived in Chicago and he never did. The only thing I can see you’ve missed is a little something about the stockyards, and you can put that in later,” I added and prepared to depart.
“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a half-dozen sheets of paper that lay on the floor by my chair. I read it eagerly. And when I had finished reading it he stammered and apologized and then, stepping across the room, jerked the sheets out of my hand and threw them out at an open window. “I wish you hadn’t seen that. It’s something else I wrote about Chicago,” he explained. He was flustered.
“You see the night was so hot, and, down at the office, I had to write a condensed-milk advertisement, just as I was sneaking away to come home and work on this other thing, and the street-car was so crowded and the people stank so, and when I finally got home here—the wife being gone—the place was a mess. Well, I couldn’t write and I was sore. It’s been my chance, you see, the wife and kids being gone and the house being quiet. I went for a walk. I think I went a little off my head. Then I came home and wrote that stuff I’ve just thrown out of the window.”
He grew cheerful again. “Oh, well—it’s all right. Writing that fool thing stirred me up and enabled me to write this other stuff, this real stuff I showed you first, about Chicago.”
And so I went home and to bed, having in this odd way stumbled upon another bit of the kind of writing that is—for better or worse—really presenting the lives of the people of these towns and cities—sometimes in prose, sometimes in stirring colorful song. It was the kind of thing Mr. Sandburg or Mr. Masters might have done after an evening’s walk on a hot night in, say West Congress Street in Chicago.
The thing I had read of Ed’s, centred about a half-filled bottle of spoiled milk standing dim in the moonlight on a window sill. There had been a moon earlier on that August evening, a new moon, a thin crescent golden streak in the sky. What had happened to my friend, the advertising writer, was something like this—I figured it all out as I lay sleepless in bed after our talk.
I am sure I do not know whether or not it is true that all advertising writers and newspaper men, want to do other kinds of writing, but Ed did all right. The August day that had preceded the hot night had been a hard one for him to get through. All day he had been wanting to be at home in his quiet apartment producing literature, rather than sitting in an office and writing advertisements. In the late afternoon, when he had thought his desk cleared for the day, the boss of the copy writers came and ordered him to write a page advertisement for the magazines on the subject of condensed milk. “We got a chance to get a new account if we can knock out some crackerjack stuff in a hurry,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to put it up to you on such a rotten hot day, Ed, but we’re up against it. Let’s see if you’ve got some of the old pep in you. Get down to hardpan now and knock out something snappy and unusual before you go home.”
Ed had tried. He put away the thoughts he had been having about the city beautiful—the glowing city of the plains—and got right down to business. He thought about milk, milk for little children, the Chicagoans of the future, milk that would produce a little cream to put in the coffee of advertising writers in the morning, sweet fresh milk to keep all his brother and sister Chicagoans robust and strong. What Ed really wanted was a long cool drink of something with a kick in it, but he tried to make himself think he wanted a drink of milk. He gave himself over to thoughts of milk, milk condensed and yellow, milk warm from the cows his father owned when he was a boy—his mind launched a little boat and he set out on a sea of milk.
Out of it all he got what is called an original advertisement. The sea of milk on which he sailed became a mountain of cans of condensed milk, and out of that fancy he got his idea. He made a crude sketch for a picture showing wide rolling green fields with white farm houses. Cows grazed on the green hills and at one side of the picture a barefooted boy was driving a herd of Jersey cows out of the sweet fair land and down a lane into a kind of funnel at the small end of which was a tin of the condensed milk. Over the picture he put a heading: “The health and freshness of a whole countryside is condensed into one can of Whitney-Wells Condensed Milk.” The head copy writer said it was a humdinger.
And then Ed went home. He wanted to begin writing about the city beautiful at once and so didn’t go out to dinner, but fished about in the ice chest and found some cold meat out of which he made himself a sandwich. Also, he poured himself a glass of milk, but it was sour. “Oh, damn!” he said and poured it into the kitchen sink.
As Ed explained to m
e later, he sat down and tried to begin writing his real stuff at once, but he couldn’t seem to get into it. The last hour in the office, the trip home in the hot smelly car, and the taste of the sour milk in his mouth had jangled his nerves. The truth is that Ed has a rather sensitive, finely balanced nature, and it had got mussed up.
He took a walk and tried to think, but his mind wouldn’t stay where he wanted it to. Ed is now a man of nearly forty and on that night his mind ran back to his young manhood in the city,—and stayed there. Like other boys who had become grown men in Chicago, he had come to the city from a farm at the edge of a prairie town, and like all such town and farm boys, he had come filled with vague dreams.
What things he had hungered to do and be in Chicago! What he had done you can fancy. For one thing he had got himself married and now lived in the apartment on the North Side. To give a real picture of his life during the twelve or fifteen years that had slipped away since he was a young man would involve writing a novel, and that is not my purpose.
Anyway, there he was in his room—come home from his walk—and it was hot and quiet and he could not manage to get into his masterpiece. How still it was in the apartment with the wife and children away! His mind stayed on the subject of his youth in the city.
He remembered a night of his young manhood when he had gone out to walk, just as he did on that August evening. Then his life wasn’t complicated by the fact of the wife and children and he lived alone in his room; but something had got on his nerves then, too. On that evening long ago he grew restless in his room and went out to walk. It was summer and first he went down by the river where ships were being loaded and then to a crowded park where girls and young fellows walked about.
He grew bold and spoke to a woman who sat alone on a park bench. She let him sit beside her and, because it was dark and she was silent, he began to talk. The night had made him sentimental. “Human beings are such hard things to get at. I wish I could get close to someone,” he said. “Oh, you go on! What you doing? You ain’t trying to kid someone?” asked the woman.
Ed jumped up and walked away. He went into a long street lined with dark silent buildings and then stopped and looked about. What he wanted was to believe that in the apartment buildings were people who lived intense eager lives, who had great dreams, who were capable of great adventures. “They are really only separated from me by the brick walls,” was what he told himself on that night.
It was then that the milk bottle theme first got hold of him. He went into an alleyway to look at the backs of the apartment buildings and, on that evening also, there was a moon. Its light fell upon a long row of half-filled bottles standing on window sills.
Something within him went a little sick and he hurried out of the alleyway and into the street. A man and woman walked past him and stopped before the entrance to one of the buildings. Hoping they might be lovers, he concealed himself in the entrance to another building to listen to their conversation.
The couple turned out to be a man and wife and they were quarreling. Ed heard the woman’s voice saying: “You come in here. You can’t put that over on me. You say you just want to take a walk, but I know you. You want to go out and blow in some money. What I’d like to know is why you don’t loosen up a little for me.”
* * *
That is the story of what happened to Ed, when, as a young man, he went to walk in the city in the evening, and when he had become a man of forty and went out of his house wanting to dream and to think of a city beautiful, much the same sort of thing happened again. Perhaps the writing of the condensed milk advertisement and the taste of the sour milk he had got out of the ice box had something to do with his mood; but, anyway, milk bottles, like a refrain in a song, got into his brain. They seemed to sit and mock at him from the windows of all the buildings in all the streets, and when he turned to look at people, he met the crowds from the West and the Northwest Sides going to the park and the lake. At the head of each little group of people marched a woman who carried a milk bottle in her hand.
And so, on that August night, Ed went home angry and disturbed, and in anger wrote of his city. Like the burlesque actress in my own house he wanted to smash something, and, as milk bottles were in his mind, he wanted to smash milk bottles. “I could grasp the neck of a milk bottle. It fits the hand so neatly. I could kill a man or woman with such a thing,” he thought desperately.
He wrote, you see, the five or six sheets I had read in that mood and then felt better. And after that he wrote about the ghostlike buildings flung into the sky by the hands of a brave adventurous people and about the river that runs down a path of gold, and into the boundless West.
As you have already concluded, the city he described in his masterpiece was lifeless, but the city he, in a queer way, expressed in what he wrote about the milk bottle could not be forgotten. It frightened you a little but there it was and in spite of his anger or perhaps because of it, a lovely singing quality had got into the thing. In those few scrawled pages the miracle had been worked. I was a fool not to have put the sheets into my pocket. When I went down out of his apartment that evening I did look for them in a dark alleyway, but they had become lost in a sea of rubbish that had leaked over the tops of a long row of tin ash cans that stood at the foot of a stairway leading from the back doors of the apartments above.
The Sad Horn Blowers
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IT had been a disastrous year in Will’s family. The Appletons lived on one of the outlying streets of Bidwell and Will’s father was a house painter. In early February, when there was deep snow on the ground, and a cold bitter wind blew about the houses, Will’s mother suddenly died. He was seventeen years old then, and rather a big fellow for his age.
The mother’s death happened abruptly, without warning, as a sleepy man kills a fly with the hand in a warm room on a summer day. On one February day there she was coming in at the kitchen door of the Appleton’s house, from hanging the wash out on the line in the back yard, and warming her long hands, covered with blue veins, by holding them over the kitchen stove—and then looking about at the children with that half-hidden, shy smile of hers—there she was like that, as the three children had always known her, and then, but a week later, she was cold in death and lying in her coffin in the place vaguely spoken of in the family as “the other room.”
After that, and when summer came and the family was trying hard to adjust itself to the new conditions, there came another disaster. Up to the very moment when it happened it looked as though Tom Appleton, the house painter, was in for a prosperous season. The two boys, Fred and Will, were to be his assistants that year.
To be sure Fred was only fifteen, but he was one to lend a quick alert hand at almost any undertaking. For example, when there was a job of paper hanging to be done, he was the fellow to spread on the paste, helped by an occasional sharp word from his father.
Down off his step ladder Tom Appleton hopped and ran to the long board where the paper was spread out. He liked this business of having two assistants about. Well, you see, one had the feeling of being at the head of something, of managing affairs. He grabbed the paste brush out of Fred’s hand. “Don’t spare the paste,” he shouted. “Slap her on like this. Spread her out—so. Do be sure to catch all the edges.”
It was all very warm, and comfortable, and nice, working at paper-hanging jobs in the houses on the March and April days. When it was cold or rainy outside, stoves were set up in the new houses being built, and in houses already inhabited the folks moved out of the rooms to be papered, spread newspapers on the floors over the carpets and put sheets over the furniture left in the rooms. Outside it rained or snowed, but inside it was warm and cosy.
To the Appletons it seemed, at the time, as though the death of the mother had drawn them closer together. Both Will and Fred felt it, perhaps Will the more consciously. The family was rather in the hole financially—the mother’s funeral had cost a good deal of money, and Fred was being allowed to stay out o
f school. That pleased him. When they worked in a house where there were other children, they came home from school in the late afternoon and looked in through the door to where Fred was spreading paste over the sheets of wall paper. He made a slapping sound with the brush, but did not look at them. “Ah, go on, you kids,” he thought. This was a man’s business he was up to. Will and his father were on the step ladders, putting the sheets carefully into place on the ceilings and walls. “Does she match down there?” the father asked sharply. “Oh-kay, go ahead,” Will replied. When the sheet was in place Fred ran and rolled out the laps with a little wooden roller. How jealous the kids of the house were. It would be a long time before any of them could stay out of school and do a man’s work, as Fred was doing.
And then in the evening, walking homeward, it was nice, too. Will and Fred had been provided with suits of white overalls that were now covered with dried paste and spots of paint and looked really professional. They kept them on and drew their overcoats on over them. Their hands were stiff with paste, too. On Main Street the lights were lighted, and other men passing called to Tom Appleton. He was called Tony in the town. “Hello, Tony!” some storekeeper shouted. It was rather too bad, Will thought that his father hadn’t more dignity. He was too boyish. Young boys growing up and merging into manhood do not fancy fathers being too boyish. Tom Appleton played a cornet in the Bidwell Silver Cornet Band and didn’t do the job very well—rather made a mess of it, when there was a bit of solo work to be done—but was so well liked by the other members of the band that no one said anything. And then he talked so grandly about music, and about the lip of a cornet player, that everyone thought he must be all right. “He has an education. I tell you what, Tony Appleton knows a lot. He’s a smart one,” the other members of the band were always saying to each other.
